Overview

Scholars, educators, health professionals, and activists from a variety of fields have struggled with one of the most significant questions of contemporary life: How do we rescue the experience of death and dying from the mire of fear, denial, and secrecy that it has been associated with for the better part of a century? In When Death Goes Pop, Charlton D. McIlwain describes a striking emerging shift in the way that death is represented in such omnipresent forms of media as television - a shift that seems to be moving the American discourse on death and dying from the private sphere to the public. The book surveys the past thirty years of death-related television programming, from daytime soaps to prime-time dramas, focusing primarily on Home Box Office's Six Feet Under and its innovative approach to the subject, and from the Sci-Fi Channel's Crossing Over to the genre of paranormal programming as a whole. This book also discusses the increasing use of multimedia and the Internet in the funeral industry and how the new technologies change the way that we remember the dead as they create and sustain what we might call a virtual community of death.

Full Product Details

9780820470641

Table of Contents

Reviews

« Charlton D. McIlwain's 'When Death Goes Pop' is an ambitious and much-needed examination of the representation of death in contemporary popular culture. The book displays an impressive synthesis of media theory, rhetorical studies, and work in thanatology, and utilizes these various bodies of scholarship to render a lucid and provocative reading of contemporary popular culture... 'When Death Goes Pop' places representations of death within broader elements of culture, especially media technology, and, in so doing, provides an intelligible grid for thinking about death as a symbolic element in popular culture. One of the most impressive elements of McIlwain's work in his integration of empirical observations with sweeping theoretical insights. This book is an excellent example of strong critical research and should be invaluable to anyone interested in the study of popular culture and media.

Author Information

The Author: Charlton McIlwain is Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in communication from the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual and Family Ecology (2003).

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